By 2015 they were trying to hide how much of the group growth and profits were largely contributed by just AWS , i.e. they were hiding the e-commerce margins .
Without AWS and subscriptions, Amazon is quite an unprofitable company.
Both overall growth and margin driven by AWS(and prime) while E-commerce revenue remains outsized because they count GMV as revenue which is iffy even when they own the merchandise, but being largely a marketplace these days GMV is very misleading metric.
It would be like Stripe decided to count their revenue as $1.4T the amount they processed this year as revenue rather than $10-20B they actually got after paying the banks, merchants , VISA etc . This 20B is not profit either just the pie from which salaries cloud costs etc have to be paid to get to actual profit.
Correct. It wasn’t a secret that AWS was profitable. Revealing those numbers put a lot more pressure on Amazon to get other business lines in better shape financially. Something Amazon was keen to avoid for as long as it could.
By 2015 they were trying to hide how much of the group growth and profits were largely contributed by just AWS , i.e. they were hiding the e-commerce margins .
Without AWS and subscriptions, Amazon is quite an unprofitable company.
Both overall growth and margin driven by AWS(and prime) while E-commerce revenue remains outsized because they count GMV as revenue which is iffy even when they own the merchandise, but being largely a marketplace these days GMV is very misleading metric.
It would be like Stripe decided to count their revenue as $1.4T the amount they processed this year as revenue rather than $10-20B they actually got after paying the banks, merchants , VISA etc . This 20B is not profit either just the pie from which salaries cloud costs etc have to be paid to get to actual profit.